A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Breakfast of Champions (Alan Rudolph, 1999)

Bruce Willis in Breakfast of Champions

Cast: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas, Omar Epps, Vicki Lewis, Buck Henry, Ken Hudson Campbell, Jake Johanssen, Will Patton, Chip Zien, Owen Wilson. Screenplay: Alan Rudolph, based on a novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Cinematography: Elliot Davis. Production design: Nina Ruscio. Film editing: Suzy Ruscio. Music: Mark Isham. 

When a film starts with a man with a gun in his mouth, you expect it to explain why he's doing that. Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions never really does. You can only accept as explanation a desire to escape the hurly-burly of events that follows. There are those who love this movie and those who would need to be strapped to a chair with their eyes taped open to watch it again. I found it exhausting and pointless, with gags that went on too long and characters who serve no function in whatever plot it possesses.  

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